


Indian Summer

by ignipes



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-31
Updated: 2005-08-31
Packaged: 2017-10-02 23:59:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-war AU. Remus, Sirius, Wales, second chances, Indian summers, all that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Indian Summer

The valley stretched before them, wide and flat and dotted with sheep. Sirius sat with his arms hooked around his knees, watching long shadows fall across the misplaced summer day. In the distance, a lone peak rose above the green-gold fields. _Craig yr Aderyn_, Remus had called it, his tongue tripping over the Welsh pronunciation. _Rock of the birds_. They soared and darted around the rocky summit, tiny dark specks against the blue sky.

Remus rolled over onto his back. "Sun's almost down."

"I thought you were asleep," Sirius said.

"I think I was, too." Remus sat up, stretching and yawning. There was dirt on his shirt and the imprint of grass on his cheek. Sirius reached out and brushed a leaf from his hair; Remus scrunched his face in reaction. "You could've woke me up. You didn't have to sit here."

Sirius shrugged. "I don't mind. It's nice here." _Peaceful_, he thought, but he didn't say it aloud.

Raising an eyebrow, Remus asked, "Is it? I thought you would hate it. _You_ thought you would hate it."

"You said 'a farm in Wales where it rains all the time,'" Sirius pointed out. "That's not anybody's idea of a holiday."

Remus was silent, and Sirius looked away uncomfortably. He opened his mouth to apologise, though he wasn't really sure what he was apologising for, but Remus spoke first. "Well," he said lightly, "it will probably start raining tomorrow. An Indian summer can't last forever."

"That's a funny name for it," Sirius said. "I wonder what it has to do with India?"

As soon as he spoke, Sirius knew that he'd said the wrong thing again. Remus didn't look at him. He continued staring out over the valley, squinting slightly in the late afternoon sunshine, but he grew still, his expression fixed.

Annoyed and inexplicably anxious, Sirius started to amend his words, "I didn't--"

"I don't know." Remus spoke over him, leaning back on his elbows casually. His expression softened, becoming thoughtful rather than controlled. "Maybe it means the American Indians. This isn't anything like summers in India, that much is certain. This is far too nice. Summer in India is _hot_, hotter than you can imagine. It feels like you're wading through the air, and everything smells twice as strong as it should, and every takes twice as much effort. Then the monsoon comes, and it's both hot and wet, and there's no way out of it, not even with Cooling Charms or Drying Spells. This," he said, gesturing toward the gentle Welsh countryside, "is not an Indian summer."

Sirius did not answer immediately. A dozen questions rose in his mind, questions he ought to have asked ages ago, questions that had been considered and dropped and ignored and forgotten during the one miserable year they'd spent together at his parent's house on Grimmauld Place. It had been so easy, then, to agree to talk and agree to listen, agreements made without words or effort, to look forward to late nights by the fire, _tell me your secrets and I'll tell you mine_, just the two of them alone with twelve years to catch up on.

It had been easy to agree, but impossible to do. Sirius quickly discovered that he had nothing more to offer than _I was in prison and alone and I nearly lost my mind_. Even saying those words, choking them out, tearing at them as if they were a tumor to be excised, had left him hollow, empty, mute. But Remus -- Remus was never hollow, never empty, for he had a brilliant, bewildering patchwork spanning the years behind them, a life too alien and bright for the grim London house.

Sirius had eventually stopped asking, and Remus had eventually stopped telling.

"How many--" Sirius swallowed around the knot of guilt in his chest. "How many summers did you spend in India?"

If Remus was surprised by the question, he hid it well. "Five," he said. "That was -- well, after that I moved around a lot. That was the longest I stayed in one place."

"Where did you go?" Sirius already knew some of the answers, but he asked anyway. _Better late than never,_ he thought. He had never before realised how true those words could be. He shook his head ruefully, but Remus wasn't looking at him.

"A lot of places. All over. Here, for one."

"Here?"

Remus turned his head, smiling at Sirius' surprise. "I worked on the farm for about a year."

Sirius tried to imagine Remus living on this quiet, lonely sheep farm, toiling in the rain and the mud, working alongside their strange, pale host whose amber gaze made Sirius feel uncomfortably as if he ought to be asking permission to cross the fields. It was an image he had a hard time forming. Sirius had wondered, since they arrived three days ago, what other peculiar friends Remus had collected around the world, who else would open their doors without question to the wizarding world's most infamous werewolf and back-from-the-dead wrongly convicted godfather. He wondered who else had filled those years of Remus' life when Sirius had been surrounded by stone and Remus had been -- wherever he had been.

Suddenly Sirius remembered, with startling clarity, his nineteen-year-old self telling Remus, on one of those careless, wasted summer afternoons that seemed to last forever, that it didn't matter if Remus couldn't' work because _he_ had connections enough for the both of them, Black family pureblood popular git connections. _He_ had ways of getting around all that Ministry nonsense. _He_ would take care of Remus.

_He_ had been an arrogant bloody prat, and stupid as hell besides.

"Oh," Sirius said. "I didn't know that."

"I was -- I needed to work, but I was a mess." Remus shook his head, smiling slightly, as though remembering something painful that no longer hurt. "It was good for me to be here."

"Oh," Sirius said again, and this time he understood. He felt a flutter of jealousy in his chest, and the unidentifiable feeling, almost like loss, that came whenever he thought about Remus living without him. But it vanished quickly.

"And," there was laughter in Remus' voice when he went on, "you needn't make any jokes about a wolf among sheep, Mr. Black, because I've heard them all."

"I'll think of some new ones," Sirius promised. "Tomorrow, when it's raining."

"We really are lucky, with this sunshine."

"Indian summer," Sirius agreed gratefully. "I like it. It's like -- the world's having another go at summer. Second chances. Summer trying again. You know."

Remus narrowed his eyes. "Second chances?"

"That's what it feels like."

"Sirius."

"Mmm?"

"Are you…is that _symbolism_ you're talking about?"

"Absolutely not," he said stiffly. "It is just an observation. About this phenomenon, the Indian summer, which, we have surmised, has nothing to do with India."

"That's good." Remus sat up and moved up the hillside a few feet, until he was sitting next to Sirius. "I wouldn't want to think you were becoming philosophical about the seasons."

"Never." He shifted a little and snaked an arm around Remus' waist, pulling him close. "I leave that flowery nonsense to the poets. 'Winter of our discontent.' _Pfft_. "

"Indeed."

He knew that Remus was laughing at him, but he didn't care. The tightness in his chest faded, and with it the guilt of unasked questions, the jealousy of lost years. Sirius inhaled the sun-soaked scent of earth and trodden grass, relaxing into Remus' warm weight, shifting his head slightly when Remus' hair tickled his cheek. The valley and hills glowed in the sunlight, and he could feel the warmth washing away, carried on the light breeze that smelled faintly of the ocean.

"I tried to leave you behind." Remus' voice was quiet, almost hesitant.

Sirius said nothing. He pulled Remus a little closer and waited.

"All over the bloody world, trying to leave you behind." A pause, then a sound that was both a laugh and a sigh. "Never quite managed it, though."

Closing his eyes against the setting sun, Sirius smiled.

-

_It was Indian Summer;  
light wolves and dark wolves howled through the day --_

_It was Indian Summer  
and a snake shed its skin._

_Then, and only then, was I properly  
human._


End file.
